TLDR 2019-12-27

Netflix had just over 12 million subscribers paying $9 a month at the beginning of the 2010s. Today, the company has a market cap of close to $148 billion, making it one of the most valuable US companies. The stock has risen 4,181% since it was listed. Netflix runs on a thin operating margin as it is expensive to buy and invest in entertainment, and competitors are forcing Netflix to spend more to stop customers from moving to other services. It projected that it would spend $15 billion on content in 2019. Netflix has borrowed close to $10 billion in the past two years, more than doubling its debt. Some shareholders are concerned as competitors, such as Disney+, are introduced to the market. Netflix is projecting that its cash burn will drop off starting next year.

Dropbox Transfer is a new way to share files. Users can share a link to the file and the recipients can either directly download the file from the transfer page or save it to their own Dropbox accounts. The system is similar to other file-sharing services like WeTransfer. Dropbox Transfer will allow users to send up to 100MB of files with a free account. Dropbox Professional subscribers will be able to transfer up to 100GB, password protect transfers, choose an expiration date for the files, and customize the background on the transfer page.

A technically advanced indoor vertical farm is growing a range of crops inside the basement of a former sugar factor in Liverpool. Farm Urban was founded in 2014, growing salads and leafy greens all year round in vertically stacked foam-filled beds without natural sunlight and soil. Traditional methods of agriculture are no longer sustainable, and a complete overhaul of food production methods is required. Other alternative farming ventures have failed in the past. These alternative food production schemes face real financial challenges. Costs must be closely monitored in order to manage the business. Farm Urban has a plan to make sure their business is viable. Its strategy is to start small and increase production as demand increases.

Researchers at the University of Bristol have successfully demonstrated quantum teleportation between two silicon chips. Quantum teleportation uses entanglement to transfer the state of one quantum particle from one place to another. It is a fundamental building-block of optical quantum computing. The researchers were able to demonstrate a high-quality entanglement link across two chips in a lab, where photons on both chips shared a single quantum state. Later experiments used four chips. Results from the experiments showed extremely high-fidelity quantum teleportation of 91 percent. The team was also able to demonstrate entanglement swapping and four-photon GHZ states.

D-Tale makes it easy to view and analyze Pandas data structures. It is a lightweight web client that can display Pandas objects using a combination of a Flask backend and a React front-end. Users can build custom charts, find correlations, create heat maps, and more.

Hippy is a cross-platform development framework that helps developers write apps for iOS, Android, and Web. It was used to develop apps that now serve hundreds of millions of users. Hippy officially supports frameworks like React and Vue. It uses the same APIs for different platforms.

Users on the SecretSanta subreddit organize a gift exchange every year, and this year, a woman named Shelby was the lucky recipient of a package from Bill Gates. Shelby received an 81-pound box on December 18 along with a donation to the American Heart Association to honor her late mother. Gates has been participating in Reddit's Secret Santa gift exchange for more than five years. He makes it a point to find personal gifts for each recipient based on the questionnaire they fill out when signing up for the exchange. Shelby's mother had died unexpectedly in March, so Gates' donation to the AHA was the most meaningful gift to her. Inside the 81-pound box, Shelby found a personal placard with a written message from Gates and a collection of gifts based on her interests.